Arch Linux User Repository

@starquake thank you for sharing your opinion. It matches mine. "expecting users to know" is a catchword. One could think that pacman unites us, but really isn't it the wiki that binds the community together? Let's do our best to introduce a section to zsh's wiki page.

I would be against including a post install script. This looks to me to be against the Arch Linux principles. Users are expected to know their way on a Linux system.

In the PKGBUILD you can see it is installed to /usr/share/oh-my-zsh.

You can find an example config there. I would say that's enough for a user to get going.

Alternatively a mention of this could be included in the Arch Wiki for ZSH.

Hello. Thank you all guys for all your input.

I personally think that post install message won't help much and isn't the way to fix the issue - for example for those that install packages with automation tools (such as Ansible). My opinion might be wrong, the wiki lacks instructions on how the install script should be used.

Please consider posting a message to a mailing list such as aur-general to get help from TUs or someone else. I might do that myself, but I think it's more reasonable that it is posted by a person that is actually for the change. (I'm looking at you @aliu (thanks again)).

Another solution would be to convince upstream to provide instructions (and possibly tools) to easily install oh-my-zsh. It is more likely for me personally to ignore pacman's output and try to tab-complete a command right after installing a package. It could be ohmyzsh-install, which would inform on how to use the package and maybe even ask the user about his current zshrc, backup it, replace or modify. System packages are not an official way of installing ohmyzsh, and that should be changed (imho) - because curl | bash is simply wrong. Please consider working with upstream first.

I won't refuse to add the post install script if the solution is deemed valid and is the voice of the people.

Please do not flag the package out of date. I am confident that all flags were not valid and I will unflag every time.

The reason people flag this is that the postinstall message isn't clear enough to tell us how to activate the package, which results in confusion "the package no work!". The maintainer hasn't responded to us in two months either... I'll write an email to them, and if they don't respond, do an orphan request.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Package Maintainer; I don't know how to unflag things.

Can someone unflag this package please? My AUR-helper keeps reminding me this packages is out of date but a git package is never up to date. Thanks!

No. You do not need to install OMZ again after installing this package. All you need to do is replace/change your .zshrc. Doing that would run the entire install script again, duplicating OMZ in your home directory.

Currently the .install says "You have to execute 'cp /usr/share/oh-my-zsh/zshrc ~/.zshrc' to use it.", which... would seem a bit suspicious. I think a better message would be "An environmental variable has to be set in your .zshrc to use oh-my-zsh. A sample .zshrc is provided at /usr/share/oh-my-zsh/zshrc."

Also, I wonder why you don't need to export ZSH in the patched zshrc?

Do you think install.sh linked to /usr/bin/ohmyzsh-install would help? I think most of us try to tab complete the package name after installing when unsure of usage.

https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/blob/master/tools/install.sh :

KEEP_ZSHRC - 'yes' means the installer will not replace an existing .zshrc (default: no)

I get that arch packages cannot write to home, but there should at least be a postinstall echo that tells you how to trigger OMZ.

I’m pretty sure OMZ usually backs up your .zshrc and overwrites it with its default one when you install it

You are pretty wrong here. My .zshrc was never overwritten by any update. That's why you store the .zshrc in your home directory .. You just have to specify the path to the installation, as it is also mentioned in the git repository of oh-my-zsh. It is not necessary to source the script, since you only need to define the environment variable (as mentioned in the documentation):

# Path to your oh-my-zsh installation.
ZSH=/usr/share/oh-my-zsh/

Don't see a reason to mark this package as outdated.

The default zshrc is here: /usr/share/oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template - Just do a copy if you need a newly generated .zshrc.:

cp /usr/share/oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc

Shouldn’t that be told to the user at the end of installing this and shouldn’t the default .zshrc be put somewhere? I’m pretty sure OMZ usually backs up your .zshrc and overwrites it with its default one when you install it